Brian Martin

[Dr Brian Martin is a
physicist whose research interests include stratospheric modelling.
He is a research associate in the Dept. of Mathematics, Faculty of
Science, Australian National University, and a member of
SANA.]

The possibility of massive death
and destruction from war has long played a major role in thinking
about war and peace. One theme has been that the increased
destructiveness of weapons would provide an effective deterrent to
war. Alfred Nobel thought that his invention of dynamite was a great
contribution to the cause of peace, and many scientists have used
similar beliefs to justify their own contributions to weapons
technology. Prior to World War II, many observers thought that the
capabilities of air bombardment were so horrific that war was
virtually unthinkable. And since the development of nuclear weapons,
nuclear deterrence has become a standard plank of Western foreign and
military policy.

The promotion of beliefs in
massive death and destruction from war has been an important facet of
the efforts of many peace movements. In the 1930s, British military
planners estimated the effects of aerial bombardment by extrapolating
linearly from the very limited experience of bombardments and
casualties in World War I. On the basis of such assumptions, people
such as Philip Noel Baker in the 1930s predicted the obliteration of
civilization from war. But the experience of World War II showed that
the 1930s military expectations of casualties per tonne of bombs were
sizeable overestimates.[1]

By the 1950s, a large number of
people had come to believe that the killing of much or all of the
world's population would result from global nuclear war. This idea
was promoted by the peace movement, among which the idea of
'overkill' - in the sense that nuclear arsenals could kill everyone
on earth several times over - became an article of faith.

Yet in spite of the widespread
belief in nuclear extinction, there was almost no scientific support
for such a possibility. The scenario of the book and movie On the
Beach,[2] with fallout clouds gradually enveloping the
earth and wiping out all life, was and is fiction. The scientific
evidence is that fallout would only kill people who are immediately
downwind of surface nuclear explosions and who are heavily exposed
during the first few days. Global fallout has no potential for
causing massive immediate death (though it could cause up to millions
of cancers worldwide over many decades).[3] In spite of the
lack of evidence, large sections of the peace movement have left
unaddressed the question of whether nuclear war inevitably means
global extinction.

The next effect to which beliefs
in nuclear extinction were attached was ozone depletion. Beginning in
the mid-1970s, scares about stratospheric ozone developed,
culminating in 1982 in the release of Jonathan Schell's book The
Fate of the Earth.[4] Schell painted a picture of human
annihilation from nuclear war based almost entirely on effects from
increased ultraviolet light at the earth's surface due to ozone
reductions caused by nuclear explosions. Schell's book was greeted
with adulation rarely observed in any field. Yet by the time the book
was published, the scientific basis for ozone-based nuclear
extinction had almost entirely evaporated. The ongoing switch by the
military forces of the United States and the Soviet Union from
multi-megatonne nuclear weapons to larger numbers of smaller weapons
means that the effect on ozone from even the largest nuclear war is
unlikely to lead to any major effect on human population levels, and
extinction from ozone reductions is virtually out of the question.[3]

The latest stimulus for doomsday
beliefs is 'nuclear winter': the blocking of sunlight from dust
raised by nuclear explosions and smoke from fires ignited by nuclear
attacks. This would result in a few months of darkness and lowered
temperatures, mainly in the northern mid-latitudes.[5] The
effects could be quite significant, perhaps causing the deaths of up
to several hundred million more people than would die from the
immediate effects of blast, heat and radiation. But the evidence, so
far, seems to provide little basis for beliefs in nuclear extinction.
The impact of nuclear winter on populations nearer the equator, such
as in India, does not seem likely to be significant. The most serious
possibilities would result from major ecological destruction, but
this remains speculative at present.

As in the previous doomsday
scenarios, antiwar scientists and peace movements have taken up the
crusading torch of extinction politics. Few doubts have been voiced
about the evidence about nuclear winter or the politics of promoting
beliefs in nuclear extinction.

Opponents of war, including
scientists, have often exaggerated the effects of nuclear war and
emphasized worst cases. Schell continually bends evidence to give the
worst impression. For example, he implies that a nuclear attack is
inevitably followed by a firestorm or conflagration. He invariably
gives the maximum time for people having to remain in shelters from
fallout. And he takes a pessimistic view of the potential for
ecological resilience to radiation exposure and for human
resourcefulness in a crisis. Similarly, in several of the scientific
studies of nuclear winter, I have noticed a strong tendency to focus
on worst cases and to avoid examination of ways to overcome the
effects. For example, no one seems to have looked at possibilities
for migration to coastal areas away from the freezing continental
temperatures or looked at people changing their diets away from
grain-fed beef to direct consumption of the grain, thereby greatly
extending reserves of food.

Nuclear doomsdayism should be of
concern because of its effect on the political strategy and
effectiveness of the peace movement. While beliefs in nuclear
extinction may stimulate some people into antiwar action, it may
discourage others by fostering resignation. Furthermore, some peace
movement activities may be inhibited because they allegedly threaten
the delicate balance of state terror. The irony here is that there
should be no need to exaggerate the effects of nuclear war, since,
even well short of extinction, the consequences would be sufficiently
devastating to justify the greatest efforts against it.

The effect of extinction politics
is apparent in responses to the concept of limited nuclear war.
Antiwar activists, quite justifiably, have attacked military planning
and apologetics for limited nuclear war in which the effects are
minimized in order to make them more acceptable. But opposition to
military planning often has led antiwar activists to refuse to
acknowledge the possibility that nuclear war could be 'limited' in
the sense that less than total annihilation could result. A 'limited'
nuclear war with 100 million deaths is certainly possible, but the
peace movement has not seriously examined the political implications
of such a war. Yet even the smallest of nuclear wars could have
enormous political consequences, for which the peace movement is
totally unprepared.[6]

The peace movement also has
denigrated the value of civil defence, apparently, in part, because a
realistic examination of civil defence would undermine beliefs about
total annihilation. The many ways in which the effects of nuclear war
are exaggerated and worst cases emphasized can be explained as the
result of a presupposition by antiwar scientists and activists that
their political aims will be fulfilled when people are convinced that
there is a good chance of total disaster from nuclear war.[7]

There are quite a number of
reasons why people may find a belief in extinction from nuclear war
to be attractive.[8] Here I will only briefly comment on a
few factors. The first is an implicit Western chauvinism The effects
of global nuclear war would mainly hit the population of the United
States, Europe and the Soviet Union. This is quite unlike the pattern
of other major ongoing human disasters of starvation, disease,
poverty and political repression which mainly affect the poor,
nonwhite populations of the Third World. The gospel of nuclear
extinction can be seen as a way by which a problem for the rich white
Western societies is claimed to be a problem for all the
world.

Symptomatic of this orientation is
the belief that, without Western aid and trade, the economies and
populations of the Third World would face disaster. But this is only
Western self-centredness. Actually, Third World populations would in
many ways be better off without the West: the pressure to grow cash
crops of sugar, tobacco and so on would be reduced, and we would no
longer witness fresh fish being airfreighted from Bangladesh to
Europe.

A related factor linked with
nuclear extinctionism is a belief that nuclear war is the most
pressing issue facing humans. I disagree, both morally and
politically, with the stance that preventing nuclear war has become
the most important social issue for all humans. Surely, in the Third
World, concern over the actuality of massive suffering and millions
of deaths resulting from poverty and exploitation can justifiably
take precedence over the possibility of a similar death toll from
nuclear war. Nuclear war may be the greatest threat to the collective
lives of those in the rich, white Western societies but, for the
poor, nonwhite Third World peoples, other issues are more
pressing.

In political terms, to give
precedence to nuclear war as an issue is to assume that nuclear war
can be overcome in isolation from changes in major social
institutions, including the state, capitalism, state socialism and
patriarchy. If war is deeply embedded in such structures - as I would
argue[9] - then to try to prevent war without making common
cause with other social movements will not be successful politically.
This means that the antiwar movement needs to link its strategy and
practice with other movements such as the feminist movement, the
workers' control movement and the environmental movement.

A focus on nuclear extinction also
encourages a focus on appealing to elites as the means to stop
nuclear war, since there seems no other means for quickly overcoming
the danger. For example, Carl Sagan, at the end of an article about
nuclear winter in a popular magazine, advocates writing letters to
the presidents of the United States and of the Soviet Union.[10] But if war has deep institutional roots, then appealing
to elites has no chance of success. This has been amply illustrated
by the continual failure of disarmament negotiations and appeals to
elites over the past several decades.

Just about everyone, including
generals and prime ministers, is opposed to nuclear war. The question
is what to do about it. Many people have incorporated doomsday ideas
into their approaches. My argument here is that antiwar activists
should become much more critical of the assumptions underlying
extinction politics.

I thank Mark Diesendorf and Ian
Watson for valuable comments on this article.

References

1. On beliefs about war before
World War Two, see George H. Quester, Deterrence before Hiroshima:
the airpower background of modern strategy (New York, Wiley,
1966).

7. I have analysed this process in
relation to scientific disagreements concerning the effects of
nitrogen oxides on stratospheric ozone in The
Bias of Science(Canberra:
Society for Social Responsibility in Science [ACT],
1979).